As a psychologist, professor and researcher who studies the immense harms of experimenting on primates in laboratories, I’m troubled by the recent rise in U.S. primate testing and the government’s plan to fund even more of this abusive and ineffective experimentation with your tax dollars. I hope you’ll join me and White Coat Waste Project to help stop this.

Right now, more than 10,000 primates are being experimented on or confined for future use by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

In troubling never-before-seen video footage of NIH primate testing obtained by White Coat Waste Project, monkeys given brain damage with injections of toxic acid are chained by the neck in tiny cages and tormented with rubber spiders and mechanical snakes, objects the primates instinctively fear, just to observe their fear reactions. This is clearly cruel, but also wasteful and irrelevant to humans.

Many primates in government labs are used in incredibly painful tests in which no pain relief at all is provided.
 
On top of this physical abuse, these primates are psychologically tormented.  Many are forcibly separated from their mothers right after birth and live in tiny cages all alone for years on end. As my own research has documented, these conditions cause primates to bite themselves, pull out their own hair and exhibit other signs of intense psychological trauma that are similar to symptoms of PTSD in humans.
 
This all continues at taxpayers’ expense even though the government admits that 95 percent of drugs that are safe and effective in animal tests fail in humans because they are ineffective or dangerous.
 
In 2015, the federal government ended the use of chimpanzees in experiments after determining it was unnecessary and unethical. And last year, following a White Coat Waste Project campaign, the FDA canceled nicotine tests on squirrel monkeys and retired the primates to an accredited sanctuary in Florida.
 
Now, we need to do the same thing for the thousands of other primates still confined in labs across the U.S.
 
Please join me and White Coat Waste Project in urging the U.S. government to cut funding for ALL primate experiments.
 
Sincerely,
 
Dr. Stacy Lopresti-Goodman